Website Hosting, Domain Set Up, Software.

Here's a little information about my set-up for maintaining this website.      All my web pages are hosted by gate.com and have been for many years. The rates are good, the service has been good. They have a decent statistics page, and you can download your log file to run a more comprehensive log stat program. It's the best hosting value I could find.      So far as my web site design, this is something that I've been piecing together a little at a time over the years. It started way back when Sara was about 4 and we wanted to keep track of where we could find great pictures of dinosaurs. It's been a hobby of mine ever since.   I do the coding myself using a few choice software products. For writing in HTML I use Horizon text editor, which is perfectly suited. It does not change the code or offer too many options. It has useful features such as find and replace, either with a single web page or with all the pages in a directory, essential when you are trying to update many pages at a time.  I also use Microsoft Expressions Web. It is up to date, keeps things where I want them, and is a pretty straightfoward wysiwyg editor.      For graphics work I've been using Paint Shop Pro by Corel. It's reasonably priced and has just the right amount of tools without overwhelming the user.      Another favorite software item I use is an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program called ABBYY Finereader. It does a good job of reading the text of the old books I enjoy working with. My new scanner is a Canon Coolscan 4400F. A fast and quiet machine. I run it using Vuescan, which is also very fast.

To check on the links that my pages go to I've been using a software product called Xenu Link Sleuth. This is a quick multi-threaded link checker that checks your links and produces a report of the results. I run this program about once a month if I get the chance. If I need to change something on all my pages then I run HTTrack Website Copier, which will go out and download my entire website so I can change some site-wide item. Filezilla FTP works as my FTP client to move files back and forth.      Another preference I have is the choice of help books I use. Whenever I get a new program I usually go out and get a copy of the corresponding QuickStart book. They are succinct and to the point. I like the Dummy books too, but the QuickStart guides avoid all the kidding around. Looking at the bookshelf I count 10 Visual QuickStart books.       So far as finding a way to have this website pay for itself, I use pay per click Adsense. This program truly is a matchmaker of web site viewer and advertiser.  It offers a direct deposit system into my paypal credit card, and then I can automatically pay for my domain name and web hosting.

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